The internet is a powerful tool for content providers to reach out to a large audience. The internet provides powerful targeted content provision methods such as contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, lifestyle targeting, demographic targeting, geographic targeting and the like. Targeted content provision methods enable content providers to reach out to the relevant audience. Through targeted content provision, content providers keep the interest in the target audience high, and effect higher return rates. Targeted content provision also enables marketers to improve their conversion rates, while keeping marketing costs in check.
Content providers perform behavioral targeting using website visitor navigation and content viewing patterns. Example software for gathering user behavioral statistics includes Google Analytics, Urchin Software from Google Inc., Yahoo! Web Analytics, and Omniture's Site Catalyst. Geographic targeting, also called geo-targeting or geo-marketing is the method of determining the geographic location (the physical location) of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code. The geographic location of the website visitor may be derived using information such as Internet Protocol (IP) address, Internet Service Provider (ISP), traceroute, and the like. Such information may be derived from click stream data, cookies, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request headers, server traffic logs. However, such methods to determine the geographic location may be complex, computing intensive and often inaccurate.
Lifestyle and demographic targeting include obtaining user information, such as annual income, user's interests, objects that a user may own, and so forth. Lifestyle and demographic information may usually be obtained from the user directly, using online forms, and surveys. However, users may not always participate in such surveys. Some users may not wish to disclose their personal information at all, since there is no immediate incentive for providing the information. Also, users may not find it interesting to fill out online forms.